A Study Of Willa Cather,Katherine Anne Porter, And Eudora Welty From The Perspective Of Literary Journalism

Literary journalism is a form of writing that combines fact and fiction, and journalism and literature. In recent years, literary journalism has become a rich, complex, dynamic, and rapidly expanding field of study. It plays an important role in media, literary, and cultural studies, contributing to the redefinition, recategorization, and recanonization of literature, journalism, culture, and art. Most importantly, literary journalism offers a new way of understanding genre, an invaluable tool for writers to experiment with, and a perspective for critics to explore the writers’ use of journalistic techniques in fiction writing.So far, scholarship on American literary journalism has focused on those male writers, who were once journalists before becoming novelists, such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and others. Little attention is paid to the journalistic work and the fiction of women writers. The three twentieth-century American women writers studied in this dissertation, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, all have worked in the field of journalism before they turned to write fiction. But few scholars, both at home and abroad, have paid sufficient attention to the connection between these writers’ journalistic experiences and their fictional works. This dissertation is an attempt to clarify the influence of the three women writers’ journalistic experiences on their fiction writing and to trace their use of journalistic principles, techniques, and style in literary writing in order to better demonstrate their artistic achievement.The three writers are studied in this dissertation first because they are all great and important writers in the twentieth-century American literature. Their shared journalistic experiences in the newsrooms, their turning from journalism to literary writing, and their use of journalistic techniques in fiction writing bring them together in this project. And more importantly, the interactive and inheritative relationships among them make a group study of the three writers workable. Distinct from the contemporary writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and others, the three writers cannot be categorized as literary journalists. But their early journalistic experiences do have conspicuous influence on their writing of fiction. Though their literary texts cannot be defined as literary journalism in a strict sense, they clearly embody the features of the genre. Different from those studies that merely discuss the writers’ borrowings of the characteristics and techniques of literary journalism in their fiction, this dissertation aims to conduct a biographical, thematic, and stylistic study of these three writers’ fictional works situated in the temporal, spatial, and artistic contexts from the perspective of literary journalism. It attempts to explore how these three writers employ journalistic techniques to combine fact with imagination, connecting place and journey, and create art through art writing.Besides Introduction and Conclusion, the main body of this dissertation is divided into three chapters. Chapter One focuses on the interplay between fact and imagination. Learning from their journalistic experiences, the three writers research thoroughly their subjects, making use of biographical materials, historical documents, and myths to create biographical fiction, historical fiction, and mythical allusion. Chapter Two concentrates on the writers’ combination of place and journey. Through adopting real places that they inhabit or visit on their journalistic assignments into fiction, confronting the dilemma between home and journey as professional newspaperwomen and fiction writers, and writing about their experience of travel abroad, these writers break through the conventional spatial confinement for women and establish themselves as independent women artists. Chapter Three investigates the writers’ creating art through art writing. Owing to their journalistic work as art critic, drama reviewer, and contact with artists and artifacts, vocal arts like music and theater, visual arts like painting and photography, and physical artifacts, all become the subject matter, theme, and format of their texts.Through an examination of the three writers’ representative works, we can see that the techniques of literary journalism offer these writers innovative ways to address reality, aesthetics, and American society. By studying the three writers from the perspective of literary journalism, this dissertation might fill the gap in the previous scholarship on these writers and lead to a new era of attention to, and recognition of, these women writers’ contribution to American literature and the making of American literary history.